Beneath the Empire of the Birds

Fiction. Carl Watson applies his eye and hand via pathos, paranoia and chaos to the over-urban world of Chicago's Uptown district, his slices of life housed under such excited mental categories as "Descenders to the Skin Cage," "The Body Like an Arrow on a Nomad Map," "Swirling Birds In the Mind is a Sign of Madness," "Escape from the Totalitarian State of Flight," "They Could Be Cannibals." Acclaimed artist Joe Coleman's paintings dot Watson's pages like interim chapters, each its own explicit but encrypted sad tale. As Watson notes, "Sometimes an event is interpreted as 'news' and re-fed into the system forming a feedback loop that ramifies its every minute aspect until it actually posits a threat that overwhelms so-called reality or 'sense'" Watson's Uptowners reside in a gray zone outside the margin of The News, but they still make their own noise--a murmur not a whimper.